First Love

Eviscerating, elegant, explosive... First Love resonates a power that is bittersweet and highly affecting -- Francesca Wade * Financial Times *
Exquisite... searing... we are also left with the stinging sense of having been loved... -- Philly Malicka * Daily Telegraph *
Compelling from the beginning. In precise, economic prose Riley conveys a sense of Edwyn and Neve's intimate relationship... An engrossing novel and Riley's writing shines through -- Susannah Butter * Evening Standard *
Gwendoline Riley [is] a fascinating novelist... She takes a familiar theme of midlife minor angst and focuses in, closer and closer, until the banal becomes surreal, even beautiful. The effect is beguiling... First Love is an exquisite and combative piece of news from nowhere - which is everywhere, too -- Joanna Kavenna * Guardian *
Riley's descriptive powers [are] masterful... First Love is suffused with gems... Original and unforgettable -- Violet Hudson * Mail on Sunday *
Exceptionally good... an impossible little wonder of a book, terrifying and horrible... Take up the gauntlet with Gwendoline Riley: it's worth it -- Alex Clark * TLS *
Devastating and stylish -- Alex Preston * Observer *
An intimate, uncompromising anatomy of love and revulsion between husband and wife, child and parents, from a writer of singular vision * Guardian *
From Turgenev's First Love to Gwendoline Riley's is not so very far; the same panoptic, all-too-human lurches, afflictions and doubts, gorgeously exposed. Riley's artistry continues to signal the rueful need to narrate - yet the nobility of that impulse: undetermined, impetuous, diffident - just as we live and love - with heartbreak always in wait -- Alan Warner
Gwendoline Riley writes beautifully and memorably. First Love is evocative, often funny, and, towards the end, very moving -- David Szalay
Visceral... almost impossible to turn away from -- Anthony Cummins * New Statesman *
Riley's First Love maps the ins and outs of human emotion. It will dazzle you * Stylist *
Makes you question what love is... [Riley] should be on every literary lover's bookshelf -- Sharmaine Lovegrove * Monocle Radio *
Riley writes in pared-back, deceptively light sentences that twist and turn the emotional landscape almost imperceptibly. Dialogue, too, is witheringly precise, often funny. First Love says something very honest about relationships -- Francesca Angelini * Sunday Times *
Riley brings you up short with almost every spiky sentence in this stealthy, penetrating novel that recasts love as a dark, terrific puzzle, perhaps never to be solved -- Claire Allfree * Daily Mail *
A modern-day Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? * Tatler *
This is, in a truly wonderful way, a perfectly horrible little novel... It is exact and exacting, [told] in pristine prose... Without giving away the ending, there is no simple ending... It is a plagal cadence, a wistful, imperfect resolution, a kind of blessing in its own way -- Stuart Kelly * Scotland on Sunday *
[With] rich character depictions [...] Riley teases out a series of painful but exquisitely comedic episodes -- John Burnside * Spectator *
Expect to read a forensic discussion of the ordinariness of life rendered bittersweet -- Elizabeth White * Vogue *
A book of extraordinary potency that does full justice to the appalling tangles into which the heart can lead us -- Stephanie Cross * Lady *
[Filled] with moments of humour and tenderness * Radio Times *
A brutal book and it will stay with you long after the hundred and sixty pages are over, but Riley manages to inject it with a thin vein of black humour -- Daniel Carpenter * Bookmunch *
A book which unflinchingly explores toxic relationships... A beguiling novel -- Theresa Munoz * National *
A short but devastating sucker punch of a book -- Eleanor Franzen * Shiny New Books *
An incisive and often chilling portrait of the narrator's mother: one of the great comic monsters of recent fiction -- James Walton * Spectator *
Outstanding... shot through with moments of almost sinister tenderness -- Anthony Cummins * Daily Telegraph *
This exquisite, disquieting novella is a minute portrait of a marriage that disintegrates into a horror in such gradual steps that each feels like a sting * Daily Telegraph *
Riley's prose is so electric, so alive with humour and insight and passion, that by the end you will want to stand up and cheer -- Paul Murray * Observer *
Riley is a writer who cuts right to the heart of things... raw, fierce and true -- Rupert Thomson * Observer *